ROON?

Roon a pricey proposition? What hobby are you in? When amps, speakers, and preamps costing $50,000 to over $500,000, or cables costing $10,000 for a few feet, a Roon lifetime purchase price is less than .10% of the sales tax that you will be paying for the above equipment. I purchased Roon 5 years ago and nothing else comes close

Roon is also a music magazine, allowing you to get overviews of musicians, look at album reviews, discography, link to performers in the band and other bands, all the data there while you listen to the album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7qBMeTJWAQ

It also provides a sophisticated digital signal processing which IMO is worth the price of Roon alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU-wLZDN4CQ

Advantages of Roon:

- Roon seamlessly integrates streaming services and your ripped CD files into one database. You create a library of your local ripped files and streaming service albums you add to your library. So even if you have no locally stored music files it is still an absolute must-have for many audiophiles. Here is why:

- you can have multiple zones in your home, playing independently or link them together.

- you can manage your music library (consisting of ripped files and/or music from streaming services which you can add to your library also) with advanced database management tools. So you can tag an album by genre, or your rating, or mood etc. Combine this with Roon’s ‘bookmarking’ options and you have a rich and powerful and personalized music database searchable in so many ways.

- you can use sophisticated DSP options to create a flatter frequency response in your room. This is great for managing bass booms or high end harshness etc should your listening room have any such issues.

- Roon’s written editorial about every album and every artist is brilliant and the way it intuitively links artists and music is fantastic. Each album has every musician/producer etc listed with links to all their other work. You learn so much and it’s a rabbit hole of musical discovery.

- The music it plays after you have listened to your chosen music will introduce you to wonderful new music. The algorithm it uses is better than any streaming services’ algorithms. So you discover fabulous new music.

- Roon Arc is an app/service which allows you to access Roon remotely (in car or away from home) and now offers full dsp options within Arc, so you can tune your audio to the car’s environment.

- The interface on phones and tablets is brilliant.

- It manages the Classical metadata from streaming services and your local library extremely well, unlike most streaming services.

- To any music lover I would say that Roon is so phenomenal you will wonder how you managed without it, it is revolutionary.

- the cost, compared to any high-end gear, is minimal.

I love Roon and would recommend it to anyone. Even if you just stream and have no local library it is still transformative to a music-loving Hi-Fi listener.

Roon was a game changer for me. Prior to it, streaming was laborious, and an “oh, let me try this” option. Now it’s my preferred option, and my cd players are not being used. My cds are digitized on my server, integrated with Qobuz, and I have end points on every system.

duckworp’s post says it best.

@mattmiller

Roon is a software just like Conductor but much more advanced and also not without its complexities. @duckworp summed it nicely for you but here is the thing, if you find yourself struggling using Roon, then all of its virtues not going to matter.
Also, Roon requires minimum of two devices (hardware) for best sound quality, one device called a server to run its core (brain) and the other a streamer, often termed as renderer. A general purpose PC or MAC can serve as Roon Core and there are limitless options for Roon endpoint (renderer).

In contrast, Conductor app is straightforward and robust. I am a long time Aurender user and also a Roon users for about three years now. I still prefer Conductor app by a mile for its simplicity and sound quality. And as you know, Conductor is equally adept at managing your library. Other may disagree with my assessment on Roon SQ but it really comes down to its implementation and your choice of gear to extract the best SQ from Roon.

If you value simplicity and convenience, then Conductor is the way to go!